Geek Rock: An Exploration of Music and Subculture examines the relationship between geek culture and popular music, tracing a history from the late 1960s to the present day. The term "geek rock" refers to forms of popular music that celebrate all things campy, kitschy, and quirky. In this collection of essays, contributors explore the evolution of this music genre, from writing songs about poodles, girls, monster movies, and outer space to just what it means to be "white and nerdy." Editors Alex DiBlasi and Victoria Willis have gathered eleven essays from across the world, covering every facet of geek culture from its earliest influences, including *Frank Zappa *Captain Beefheart *Devo *They Might Be Giants *Weird Al Yankovic *Present-day advocates of "Nerdcore" Geek Rock offers a working history of this subgenre, which has finally begun to come under academic study. The essays take a variety of scholarly approaches, encompassing musicology, race, gender studies, sociology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Geek Rock will be of interest to readers of all backgrounds: music scholars, college and university professors, sociologists, and die-hard fans.

This memoir by the internationally renowned jazz pianist Art Hodes, born in Russia in 1904, is in its own way a blues, a lament for and a celebration of music and musicians we have lost. The last of the living legends among Chicago jazz musicians, Hodes joins with jazz historian Chadwick Hansen to provide a unique perspective on more than seven decades of jazz history. With an honesty not usually found in jazz books, Hot Man captures Hodes's professional career from his apprenticeship in Chicago in the 1920s to the present. The book offers remarkable inside views of gangster clubowners, the great New York jazz clubs and the vicious "jazz wars" of the 1940s, Chicago from the 1950s, the very closed and special world of jazz musicians, the curious relationships between musicians and their audiences, and Hodes's experiences with jazz greats including Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. No other white musician has given us such a full account of learning to play from black musicians. This intimate journey takes us to a vast circle of fellow musicians, to recording companies and the business of the profession, to Nodes's other career as a writer and editor of the Jazz Record, a publication that existed through most of the 1940s. Hodes's story includes almost thirty photographs and a comprehensive discography, filling a gap in the world of jazz literature.

Kendrick Lamar has established himself at the forefront of contemporary hip-hop culture. Artistically adventurous and socially conscious, he has been unapologetic in using his art form, rap music, to address issues affecting black lives while also exploring subjects fundamental to the human experience, such as religious belief. This book is the first to provide an interdisciplinary academic analysis of the impact of Lamar's corpus. In doing so, it highlights how Lamar's music reflects current tensions that are keenly felt when dealing with the subjects of race, religion and politics. Starting with Section 80 and ending with DAMN., this book deals with each of Lamar's four major projects in turn. A panel of academics, journalists and hip-hop practitioners show how religion, in particular black spiritualties, take a front-and-center role in his work. They also observe that his astute and biting thoughts on race and culture may come from an African American perspective, but many find something familiar in Lamar's lyrical testimony across great chasms of social and geographical difference. This sophisticated exploration of one of popular culture's emerging icons reveals a complex and multi faceted engagement with religion, faith, race, art and culture. As such, it will be vital reading for anyone working in religious, African American and hip-hop studies, as well as scholars of music, media and popular culture.

- Global scope and focus on transnational encounters provide a new way of looking at the history of sound recording and the music industry - Inclusion of interdisciplinary perspectives makes this book relevant to music, sound studies, media studies, and the history of technology

Author Nick Johnstone unravels the all too short life and career of one of Britain's most brilliant and troubled stars. Amy Amy Amy tracks Winehouse's erratic journey to fame from her North London Jewish family home, detailing her meteoric rise to stardom and the two albums that catapulted her to the top. Her well-publicised problems with alcohol and drugs, anorexia, bulimia and personal relationships kept her in the headlines, always threatening to obscure her extraordinary musical gifts. Amy Amy Amy redresses the imbalance, giving full measure to Winehouse's talent while offering an honest account of her multiple personal crises. This updated edition of Amy Amy Amy takes the story up to July 2011 and Amy's tragic and unexpected death at her home in Camden Town following an aborted European tour and her final appearance on stage with her goddaughter at the Roundhouse in Camden.

Since rock's beginnings, there have been groupies. These chosen few women who bed, but not often wed, the musicians of their dreams are almost as much a part of music history as the musicians themselves. Pamela Des Barres, the world's foremost supergroupie, here offers an all-access backstage pass to the world of rock stars and the women who love them. Having had her own affairs with legends such as Keith Moon and Jimmy Page--as documented in her bestselling memoir "I'm with the Band"--Pamela now turns the spotlight onto other women who have found their way into the hearts and bedrooms of some of the world's greatest musicians. In "Let's Spend the Night Together, "she tells, in their own words, the stories of these amazing women who went way beyond the one-night stand. Here you'll get to know 24 outrageous groupies, including - Tura Satana, Miss Japan Beautiful, who taught Elvis how to dance and gave him lessons in lovemaking - Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who tangled with Tom Jones in Sin City - Soulful Miss Mercy, who discovered that not only does the rest of the world listen to Al Green while making love--so does Al Green - Cynthia Plaster Caster, who redefined art and made history when Jimi Hendrix plunged his member into her plaster mold - The mysterious Miss B, who reveals Kurt Cobain's penchant for lip gloss and pantyhose - and over a dozen more

In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors' southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.

Appearing in early 70s New York City as primal prototype street punks, Suicide are now hailed as one of the most important and influential groups of the 20th century, inspiring that decade's major musical movements but too feared and shunned to be awarded their rightful acclaim at the time. Confronting shocked audiences with their electronic "New York blues", singer Alan Vega and instrumentalist Martin Rev fearlessly mirrored the city's sleazy underbelly and decay on blood-freezing gutter-scapes such as 'Ghost Rider' and 'Frankie Teardrop' while invoking doo-wop purity on timeless love songs like 'Cheree' and 'Dream Baby Dream'.The book charts Suicide's uncompromising roller coaster from formative days in performance art and avant garde experimentation to chaotic early shows at drug-infested downtown hotbed the Project of Living Artists.Along with detailed accounts of Suicide's influences, contemporaries and environment which spawned them, the book will position the duo as one of New York's most pivotal but derided outfits as the story moves through their pioneering first album, 1978's shockingly violent UK tour supporting The Clash and subsequent recordings, live sorties and respective parallel solo careers, going up to the present day. The author's eye witness accounts and extensive first-hand interviews with Alan Vega and Martin Rev are joined by conversations with producers Craig Leon, Marty Thau and Bob Blank, contemporaries including Blondie, Jayne County and the New York Dolls and fans such as Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie and The Clash; adding to a definitive account of this most unique group. With an introduction by Lydia Lunch

This book explores the growing phenomenon of music tourism - instances of people visiting places because of a connection with music. Asking how an abstract art form such as music can lead to tourism and how the popularity of music tourism in contemporary culture might be explained, it presents a comparative study of musical tourism in various locations across Europe, in relation to a range of musical genres. Through the concept of 'musical topophilia', the author offers a timely and insightful analysis of the affective attachment to place and music, showing how and why music literally moves people. This account enables us to grasp the complex ways in which music, place, and tourism are connected in practice. Based on empirical case studies, Contemporary Music Tourism lays the foundation for a theoretical grounding of music tourism as a research field and, as such, will appeal to scholars of geography, music, sociology, tourism, and cultural studies.

*** 'A fantastical journey through what might have been... Exciting and compelling' -CHRIS HAWKINS, BBC 6 MUSIC 'A detailed researcher and writer... Ingenious' -RECORD COLLECTOR This is the story of the great lost Beatles album. The end of the Beatles wasn't inevitable. It came through miscommunication, misunderstandings and missed opportunities to reconcile. But what if it didn't end? What if just one of those chances was taken, and the Beatles carried on? What if they made one last, great album? In Like Some Forgotten Dream, Daniel Rachel - winner of the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize - looks at what could have been. Drawing on impeccable research, Rachel examines the Fab Four's untimely demise - and from the ashes compiles a track list for an imagined final album, pulling together unfinished demos, forgotten B-sides, hit solo songs, and arguing that together they form the basis of a lost Beatles masterpiece. Compelling and convincing, Like Some Forgotten Dream is a daring re-write of Beatles history, and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Praise for Daniel Rachel: Walls Come Tumbling Down: 'Superlative...brilliant' - Q Magazine 'Triumphant' - The Guardian 'Brilliant' - Mojo Isle of Noises: 'In depth, scholarly' - Q Magazine 'Fascinating' - The Guardian / NME 'Fantastic, insightful interviews' - Noel Gallagher Don't Look Back in Anger: 'A-grade, A-list' - The Sunday Times 'A rollicking read' - Mail on Sunday 'Remarkable' - Art Review 'Book of the Week' - The Guardian

The origin story of hip-hop-one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx-has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements-DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing-and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.

What does jazz "mean" 20 years into the 21st century? Has streaming culture rendered music literally meaningless, thanks to the removal of all context beyond the playlist? Are there any traditions left to explore? Has the destruction of the apprenticeship model (young musicians learning from their elders) changed the music irrevocably? Are any sounds off limits? How far out can you go and still call it "jazz"? Or should the term be retired? These questions, and many more, are answered in Ugly Beauty, as Phil Freeman digs through his own experiences and conversations with present-day players. Jazz has never seemed as vital as it does right now, and has a genuine role to play in 21st-century culture, particularly in the US and the UK.

In the early spring of 1959, six musicians went into the 30th Street Studio in New York. Nine hours later, they had recorded one of the finest albums of the twentieth century. Kind of Blue traces Miles Davis's development into an artist capable of making such a masterpiece, and explores the careers and struggles of the musicians who shaped him and played alongside him. Using interviews and pictures, studio dialogue and outtakes, the great jazz historian Ashley Kahn follows Miles and his group into the studio, to show precisely how the greatest jazz record of all time was made, how it was introduced to the world, and how it changed music forever.

In a relatively short time span, grunge music exploded out of its native Seattle and became the most dominant force of the early '90s. Groundbreaking bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains introduced a generation of young rock fans to their grainy, hard-edged brand of modern metal. The rise to prominence for these and other grunge monsters is detailed here, in Guitar World Presents Nirvana and the Grunge Revolution. The first section of the book serves as a tribute to the late Nirvana guitarist Kurt Cobain. It features revealing interviews with Cobain, a behind-the-scenes look at Nirvana's legendary MTV "Unplugged" performance, and an insider's guide to the making of their groundbreaking album, Nevermind. In addition, the book features interviews with many others who played key roles in the Seattle sound explosion, including Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, Alice in Chains' Jerry Cantrell and Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell. 200 pages, 6" x 9"

An insightful study of seven great pop musicians who expanded the boundaries of musical creativity in their own different ways during the peaks of their careers in the second half of the 20th Century. The musicians discussed in this work are Yoko Ono, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Sun Ra, James Brown, and Sigmund Snopek III. The author Bob Mielke teaches American Literature and Culture at Truman State University.

Blending the insights of musicians and psychologists from D.W. Winnicott to Gregory Bateson to Ornette Coleman, Jazz and Psychotherapy is a groundbreaking exploration of improvisation that reveals its potential to transform our experience of ourselves and the challenges we face as a species. What we all share with the professional improvisers known as "psychotherapists" and "jazz musicians" is the reality of not knowing what those around us-or even we ourselves-are going to do next. Rather than avoiding it, however, these practitioners have learned to revere our inherent unpredictability as precisely the feature of human living that makes transformative change possible, fully incorporating it into the theories and practices that constitute their disciplines. Jazz and Psychotherapy provides a sophisticated but accessible overview of the revolutionary approaches to human development and creative expression embodied in these two seemingly disparate twentieth-century cultural traditions. Readers interested in music, psychotherapy, social psychology and contemporary theories of complexity will find Jazz and Psychotherapy engaging and useful. Its colorful synthesis of perspectives and multidimensional scope make it an essential contribution to our understanding of improvisation in music and in life.

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate. Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion. This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet is one of the seminal albums in rock history. Arguably it not only marks the advent of the 'mature' sound of the Rolling Stones but lays out a new blueprint for an approach to blues-based rock music that would endure for several decades. From its title to the dark themes that pervade some of its songs, Beggars Banquet reflected and helped define a moment marked by violence, decay, and upheaval. It marked a move away from the artistic sonic flourishes of psychedelic rock towards an embrace of foundational streams of American music - blues, country - that had always underpinned the music of the Stones but assumed new primacy in their music after 1968. This move coincided with, and anticipated, the 'roots' moves that many leading popular music artists made as the 1960s turned toward a new decade; but unlike many of their peers whose music grew more 'soft' and subdued as they embraced traditional styles, the music and attitude of the Stones only grew harder and more menacing, and their status as representatives of the dark underside of the 60s rock counterculture assumed new solidity. For the Rolling Stones, the 1960s ended and the 1970s began with the release of this album in 1968.

This limited printing, hardcover 40th anniversary edition includes: -an exclusive new interview with lead singer Simon Le Bon -a Rio timeline -a newly designed book cover by Rio album sleeve designer, Malcolm Garrette -vintage Duran Duran photos and ads -and much more... In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music's art-rock-the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as "Hungry Like the Wolf" and the title track. However, Rio wasn't a success everywhere at first; in fact, the LP had to be buffed-up with remixes and reissued before it found an audience in America. The album was further buoyed by colorful music videos and a cutting-edge visual aesthetic, both of which established the 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees as leaders of an MTV-driven second British Invasion. Via extensive new and exclusive interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration-and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist.

Forty years, twenty-eight ODs, three botched suicides, two heart attacks, a couple of jail stints, a debilitating stroke . . .

Now, Steven Adler, the most self-destructive rock star ever, is ready to share the shattering, untold truth.

Once upon a time, Steven Adler--along with four uniquely talented but very complicated and demanding musicians--helped form Guns N' Roses. They emerged from the streets, primal artists who obliterated glam rock and its big hair to resurrect rock's truer blues roots . . . and took "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" to obscene levels of reckless abandon. By the late 1980s, GN'R was the biggest rock band in the world, grabbing headlines and awards while selling out huge arenas. But there was a price to pay. For Adler, it was his health and sanity, culminating in his brutal public banishment by his once-beloved musical brothers--a humiliating act of betrayal that caused him to plunge into the dark side and spend most of the next twenty years in a drug-fueled hell.

In "My Appetite for Destruction," Adler digs deep, revealing the last secrets--not just his own but GN'R's as well.

Women have been pivotal in the country music scene since its inception, as Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson make clear in The Women of Country Music. Their groundbreaking volume presents the best current scholarship and writing on female country musicians. Beginning with the 1920s career of teenage guitar picker Roba Stanley, the contributors go on to discuss Polly Jenkins and Her Musical Plowboys, 50s honky-tonker Rose Lee Maphis, superstar Faith Hill, the relationship between Emmylou Harris and poet Bronwen Wallace, the Louisiana Hayride's Margaret Lewis Warwick, and more.

Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener's Companion takes a long overdue look at the music and stage act of rock music's self-styled arch-villain. A provocateur from the very start of his career in the mid-1960s, Alice Cooper, aka Vince Furnier, son of a lay preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ, carved a unique path through five decades of rock'n'roll. Despite a longevity that only a handful of other artists and acts can match, Alice Cooper remains a difficult act and artist to pin down and categorize. During the last years of the 1960s and the heydays of commercial success in the 1970s, Cooper's groundbreaking theatricality, calculated offensiveness, and evident disregard for the conventions of rock protocols sowed confusion among his critics and evoked outrage from the public. Society's watchdogs demanded his head, and Cooper willingly obliged at the end of each performance with his on-stage self-guillotining. But as youth anthem after youth anthem - "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out," "Elected," "Department of Youth"-rang out in his arena concerts the world over and across airwaves, fans flocked to experience Cooper's unique brand of rock. Critics searched for proper descriptions: "pantomime," "vaudeville," "retch-rock," "Grand Guignol." In 1973 Cooper headlined in Time magazine as "Schlock Rock's Godzilla." In Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener's Companion, Ian Chapman surveys Cooper's career through his twenty-seven studio albums (1969-2017). While those who have written about Cooper have traditionally kept their focus on the stage spectacle, too little attention has been paid to Cooper's recordings. Throughout, Chapman argues that while Cooper may have been rock's most accomplished showman, he is first and foremost a musician, with his share of gold and platinum albums to vouch for his qualifications as a musical artist.

'So honest and pure as to count as a true rapture' JOAN DIDION 'A poetic masterpiece' JOHNNY DEPP 'Our St John of the Cross, a mystic full of compassion' EDMUND WHITE 'A roadmap to my life', from the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of cafes and haunts she has worked in around the world REVISED EDITION WITH FIVE THOUSAND WORDS OF BONUS MATERIAL AND NEW PHOTOGRAPHS M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable artists at work today.